CraigOhMyEggo

This was always an issue in Rome. People were afraid their heirs would turn out to secretly be wannabe dictators, and you couldn't do anything about it since you were dead. How would you go about making sure your heir was as close to your vision as possible, both outwardly and in their desires should they be emperor?

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, no, I'm not talking about the movie/show The Watchmen. I'm referring to the ancient philosophical question "quis custodiet ipsos custodes" or "who watches the watchmen". Go read up on that elsewhere.

For those of you who don't know and need a summary here, it's a question often posed in reference to the fact that the person or people in charge of making sure the rules are honored have nothing preventing them from disobeying the rules. There's never anything preventing the person guarding your treasure from stealing some of the treasure, for example.

What's the best remedy to this that you can think of?

I ask this during a time when it has become trendy to "expose" the inner workings of so-called cults. Ever since Leah Remini started doing her exposé gig with her time spent in Scientology, different people have come forward claiming to have been in cults, sometimes seeing cults where they don't even exist (which is why I've often joked this is the "new new atheist movement" or the "Mephistopheles panic", a joke on the fact it's just another Satanic panic). The comments section never sees it my way, but I can see through a lot of these cough cough Alyssa Grenfall cough cough

However, nobody in this part of the media has ever been known for complete honesty/accuracy. For example, there were survivor tips that used to circulate on there for people who were stuck in the desert, and many of these tips, such as vaporizing your pee to drink it, would most likely kill you.

But there are many of you who have expertise or opinions that draw you against some people more than others. What such people do you disagree with or object to the most?

There is an individual I know who has probably pissed off entire communities with a lot of ambiguously moral situations. People don't keep it a secret they don't like her, and occasionally someone who notices her object to how they treat her will quip "if so many people wreak of being shit to you, maybe you should check your own shoes".

Once in a while though, I noticed she would respond to that statement with "if it were my own shoes, it's also the shoes of the local authorities, as they have no problem with me, only those of you they're stepping on do". Oddly enough, this is completely true. I see situations like this where it's the masses VS people in positions of wisdom (with situations like this making you wonder if the people in positions of wisdom are enough to outweigh the masses) and I am intrigued because it makes you ask why both exist, and it makes me wonder if people who spend so long not putting salience into a systemic process of conflict mediation have trouble navigating how to deal with it.

I would wonder if they reflect, and reflect, and reflect, until some trivial detail triggers a eureka moment, for example two people might be fighting bitterly with each other and it might be difficult to put one as more moral than the other, until you realize one of them had been previously banned from the place they're fighting in.

The last time you had to assess who was the asshole in a certain situation, what was that tipping point, that last straw, the tiebreaker that made you realize there was a slightly larger moral weight on one side than the other?

You can consider this installment four of my previous question which is the third installment.

Throughout history, we have developed many methods of telling time. The most famous two examples being the clock and the sundial. The ancient Egyptians invented the clepsydra, an extremely simple device that uses dripping water as a way to tell how much time has passed. There are also, for example, hourglasses, which flow sand as a measurement of time.

Suppose, though, you were an intelligent dolphin and, for some reason, had to always have a time reference on you. Being under the water seems to present a challenge, for technology like clocks and hourglasses don't seem to be possible to make under the water, a clepsydra certainly wouldn't work since you can't pour water underwater, and a sundial wouldn't have the proper lighting. So you must improvise in order to find a way to keep track of time. How would you improvise in order to keep track of time.